Hello!
What serendipity! Yesterday, just after we posted our first blog post someone from the Bulgarian National Television (Chanel 1) called us with a question and interview about our life and work as self-employed artists. Right now there is discussion in the parliament here about the need for a new law status for self-employed people, so they want us to be the sample of 100% self-employed family in their Sunday Evening News spot. The TV team was here in our studio today, and the interview was on air 3 hours ago. They just uploaded it on the site of Chanel 1, you can see it in the link below, we appear after the 40th second of it:
http://bnt.bg/bg/news/view/41853/pecheli_li_se_ot_nadomnija_trud
Since the interview is in Bulgarian probably most of you will not understand it. Below I'll try to translate what we said in it:
On the question "Why did you start making beads, instead of something else?"
my answer is: The beads were the only product that was feasible to be able to fire with the limited technical/equipment options that were available to me when I started my first experiments with clay. Especially in those years (beginning of the 90's) it was almost impossible to buy a good kiln for the firing of ceramic items. It can be funny and even ridiculous from the present point of view, but in fact my first "kiln" was "чушкопек"
* (see below)
On the question "Exatly how do you make each pendant?"
Kremena answered: We are using molds only for the shaping of the pendants, this is the only way to keep the consistency in the shape and size for them. Once the pendant is shaped I'm carving it completely by hand. It's a bit sad, but not everybody is understanding how hard and time consuming this all is.
We hope you'll have fun with the video, at least for us it was very funny to see our faces on the TV screen and to hear our voices during the interview.
Have a nice Sunday evening!
Vlad & Kremena
* "чушкопек" - it should be pronounced "chushkopek", only possible translation of this local invention that is coming to mind is "pepper furnace". It's one of the very odd inventions of late socialistic epoch here ('80). Bellow is the picture that I found on internet of it, happily I never used such thing after 1993.
